Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Over the last weekend, we turned our spare bedroom into a family closet. We had a small family closet in the laundry room at one time, but deconstructed it. Man, that was silly!!!

Clothing and laundry are an ongoing struggle. I have systems for it all, but at the end of the day .. there are often piles of clothes on bedrooms floors. Is it clean? Smell test!! Brother!!

We did not have the problems with clothing and laundry when we had the family closet before.

So, rewind ... family closet time again.

We started by clearing the room and then moving in racks.

I developed a plan ... kinda ...

At some point we realized the Container Store Elfa rack we had was junk -- bungee cords could not hold it together any longer and went to IKEA for some other drawer systems. (Note: the other white racks are The Container Store's Intermetro line and they are fabulous! Some of these racks we have had for 10 years)

IKEA is so great ... and easy to assemble!

After getting the IKEA racks assembled, we finished up loading the clothes!!!

The rack on the left holds ~~~ Top - middle girls shirts, and bottom - little girl shirts

The center hanging section has big girls shirts and dresses on the top and little girls dresses and skirts on the bottom

The rack to the right has big boy shirts on the top and little boy shirts on the bottom.

The garment rack is for unused hangers and processing adult laundry. I also added some clothes hampers under the bottom section of the racks so we have a place for dirty laundry.

The wooden dressers hold boys pants and girls pajamas.

The wire rack is on the other side of the room and holds linens on the top two shelves. The bottom two shelves have empty tubs that are being used to hold pajamas that can be re-worn.

(In the picture there are some damp pants drying)

This was not a small undertaking -- It took us the entire weekend, but my hope is that it will ease our clothing related chores! Time will tell -- we are on day 3 and so far so good! I do plan to print picture cards for the little ones along with a picture of them and add those to the drawer labels -- I wish I would have thought of that ahead of time for my non readers.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

I did a "big" cook and tried something new - using my roaster, pressure cookers and crock pots as my sous chef. They cooked the meats and beans that were the backbones of the dished I made. It was pretty fabulous. I will use this method again. I love the pressure cooker. I can cook beans from dry in about an hour, big beans take a little longer. I made bone broth in the crockpot (I actually started that on Sunday) In my big roaster, I made 12 pounds of ground beef. It was such an easy process, that we left in the middle of the day to go make ornaments with friends.

Tailgaters

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